The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Love to the tender; peace to those who mourn;
Hope to the hopeless, hope that does not fail,
Whose symbol is the anchor, not the sail;
Glory that spreads to Heaven's remotest bourn
And to its centre doth again return
Like music; health revisiting the frail;
Freedom to those who pine in dungeons pale;
Sorrows which God hath willed and Christ hath worn!
Omnipotence to be the poor man's shield;
Light, uncreated light, to cheer the blind;
Infinite mercy sent to heal and bind
All wounds encountered in life's well-fought field;
These are God's gifts to man;—nor these alone:
Himself He gives to all who make those gifts their own.

II. LAW AND GRACE.

Yes, I remember: once beneath a yoke
We walked, with jealous pride and painful fear:

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Then a stern footstep sounded ever near;
And, when that Presence dread His silence broke,
Austere and cold as if a statue spoke,
Each marble sentence smote upon my ear;
Yet ‘Thou shalt not’ was all that I could hear—
Then sudden from its trance my spirit woke.
The sun was rising. Floods of light divine,
Golden, and crimson on the mountains played.
I saw the village spire like silver shine:
Eolian music filled the echoing shade:
And I could hear, through all the murmuring glen,
Music of moving Gods come down to live with men.

III. CHURCHES.

A castle strongly built, and eminent
Above Time's battle-plain defaced and gory;
A palace where, in robes of kingly glory
Our spirits rest; among parched sands a tent;
One sunlit isle in a vexed element;
A gallery graced with all the pictured story
Of earth and man; a high observatory
Whence eyes of seers for aye on Heaven are bent:—
Such is yon Church: and round its tapering spire
I see, descending like a heavenly crown
Immortal forms a wreathed and beautiful choir
Bearing in golden urns and baskets down
Angelic food; and scattering with the sound
Of hymns and chaunted psalms those demons hovering round!

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IV.

Ye praise the humble: of the meek ye say
‘Happy they live among their lowly bowers;
The mountains, and the mountain-storms are ours!’
Thus, self-deceivers, filled with pride alway,
Reluctant homage to the good ye pay,
Mingled with scorn like poison sucked from flowers—
Revere the humble! godlike are their powers:
No mendicants for praise of men are they.
The child who prays in faith ‘Thy will be done’
Is blended with that Will Supreme which moves
A wilderness of worlds by Thought untrod;
He shares the starry sceptre, and the throne:
The man who as himself his neighbour loves
Looks down on all things with the eyes of God!

V.

That depth of love the Church doth bear to thee
Thou knowest not yet; for thou not yet hast felt
The beatings of an infant's bosom melt
Into thine own; and all that mystery
Whereby, nought-seeing—caring not to see—
The creature, instinct-taught, its food doth draw
By a sweet pressure and benignant law
Forth from its mother's breast perpetually.
But, by the blessings of thy future hearth,
By all its order, sanctity, and peace,
Resist not Her whose meek and tearful eyes
Followed the wanderer ever from Her birth;
Whose shadow charmed thy sleep; whose litanies
Soft as Spring's breath woke first thy soul's increase!

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VI. THE VASTNESS OF DIVINE TRUTH LOST IN ITS SIMPLICITY.

From end to end we glance; from Adam's fall
To Christ's triumphant death and victory,
At once—those mysteries that between them be
By man are known but scantly, if at all:
And thus in time our marvel waxes small;
Thus gazing down into an air-like sea
Its depth eludes us from its purity,
And treasures ours so cheaply vainly call
For gratitude or gladness. On we go
Unmoved beneath a heaven of awe-struck eyes;
While purer beings, Angel minds that know
The cost of that great boon which we despise
Look down on us, suspended from their skies,
With deeper awe than men on God bestow.

VII. EVIDENCES OF RELIGION.

1.

Letters there be too large for us to read:
Words shouted mock the sense, and beat the air:
Emblazon not in such a type thy creed:
Through such a trumpet peal not thou thy prayer.
Truth has her Saxon friends, of whom beware:
No alien help, or haughty, doth she need:
To him who seeks her, pure in heart and deed
Her pledges and her proofs are everywhere.

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Whate'er we hear or see; whate'er doth lie
Round us in Nature; all that human thought
In Science, or in Art, hath found, or wrought,
Stand fixed as notes on Truth's immortal book.
What need we more? a Commentary? look
Through all the mighty roll of History!

VIII. EVIDENCES OF RELIGION.

2.

Ye who would build the Churches of the Lord!
See that ye make the western portals low:
Let no one enter who disdains to bow.
High Truths profanely gazed at, unadored,
Will be abused at first, at last abhorred;
And many a learned, many a lofty brow
Hath rested, pillowed on a humbler vow
Than critic ken can notice or record.
O stainless peace of blest Humility!
Of all who fain would enter, few, alas!
Catch the true meaning of that kind, sad eye;
While thou, God's portress, stationed by His door,
Dost stretch thy cross so near the marble floor
That children only, without bending, pass.

An ancient custom.

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IX. SIMPLICITY AND STEADFASTNESS OF MIND.

When plain and city, garden, mount and wood
Under the Flood's blank tablet lay unseen
Three objects only met thy vision keen
Angel of Earth! in that wild solitude;
The Sun; that shining and unshadowed flood:
And, heaven-ward lifted on its tide serene,
The Ark, sole-drifting where a world had been—
No meaner image lured thine eye from God.
Our eyes are full of idols: O! that we
From those soul-murdering gewgaws of the day
Might turn, and fix our gaze immovably
Upon God's Church, tracking its marvellous way
Over the ocean of God's awful Love—
And Him, that steadfast Sun which lights her from above.

X. THE PENITENT.

From grave to grave I pace inwardly sighing
‘Is not this place for my repentance meet?’
Borne through dark boughs the night-winds unreplying
The unanswered question mournfully repeat.
To you I turn, under the damp grass lying,
O Friends; and pray you from your dusk retreat
To breathe a spirit of sorrow holy and sweet
Over this heart dried up, in silence dying.

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And thou, in Palestine's cold shadows sleeping
'Mid dust with tears of thine so often blent
Give me one gush of thy perpetual weeping,
Holy Saint Mary, ever penitent!
Night after night fresh dews revive the flowers:
Ah! that one Baptism should alone be ours!

XI. SPIRITUAL RETREATS.

(PENITENTIAL 1.)

Baths of the Church! seclusions sad, yet dear!
Amid your cloistral caves, and shadowy cells,
That dark-stoled hermitress, Repentance, dwells,
Haunting your loneliest shades with patient cheer;
And agitating oft with hallowing tear
The streams Bethesdal of your healing wells;
Or murmuring low her grief-taught oracles
For souls too weak to feel, too proud to hear.
‘Alas! world-wearied Spirits, fly no more!
These springs make strong the feeble knees: these dews
Efface the lines of lingering care; infuse
Immortal youth through bosoms of threescore:—
Draw near. The Angels shall your introit sing,
Fanning your weary foreheads with assuasive wing.

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XII. DISCIPLINE OF THE CHURCH.

(PENITENTIAL 2.)

Too much of mirth—too many smiles—depart
Vain phantoms of the Sense, false baits of sin!
One hour for holy mourning who may win
Amid the clamour of the world's loud mart?
A sigh throws wide the portals of the heart:
Pure Spirits enter: good resolves begin:
How wholesome then that care, how kind that art
The highways of man's life o'ershadowing
With cypress thickets at wide intervals,
And gardens bowered 'mong cedar-darkened rifts
Hollowed with dewy vaults, and silent halls;
Where smooth once more the sould her forehead lifts
And pleasurably spreads a widening eye
Shrunk up too long and dimmed by the sun's tyranny!

XIII. PENITENTIAL SEASONS.

‘Large as the beads of this dark rosary
Was each successive drop that slowly fell
Down from the Saviour's temples, audible
To the earth's beating heart. O misery!
I had forgotten them! forget not me,
Thou merciful Redeemer. Like a knell
My sinful Past salutes me! Let me dwell
Henceforth in that sad garden, Lord, with Thee.’

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Even thus the Holy Church with lifted palms
On her wet eyelids pressed and forehead pale
Depressed beneath a dusk, funereal veil
Chaunteth all night her penitential psalms:
Nor from her mournful litanies can cease
Until the sun shall rise and give her peace.

XIV. ON A PICTURE OF THE MAGDALENE.

Weeper perpetual, of whom men say
Not that she lived so long, ‘but so long wept;’
And in her fond imagination crept
Fearful, yet fond, to those blest feet each day:
There knelt to wash them: there to wipe them lay:
There in her shining locks caught them and kept:
And hallowed thus, a tender love-adept,
Thenceforth those glittering tresses never grey!—
Fulfilled Thy Master's word hath been! Where'er
Thy Lord is preached art thou remembered, making
Repentance to sad hearts dear, and yet dearer.
Thine eyes like heavens by midnight rains left clearer,
How oft we see thee thus through deserts bare,
Thy sad yet solaced way in silence taking!

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XV. DISCIPLINE OF THE CHURCH.

(COMMEMORATIVE.)

With solemn forms, benign solicitudes,
But each a Sacramental type and pledge
Of Grace, the Church inweaves a sheltering hedge
Around her garden vale in the wild woods;
Giving Heaven's calm to Nature's varying moods.
She plants a cross on every pine-girt ledge:
A chancel by each river's lilied edge.
Where'er her Catholic dominion broods,
Behold how two Infinitudes are mated,
The Mighty and Minute by the control
Of Love or Duty linked with care sublime!
On earth no spot, no fleeting point of time,
Within our mind no thought, within our soul
No feeling, doth she leave unconsecrated.

XVI. NATURAL RELIGION.

Search ye the Heart of man until ye find
That which is deepest. Raise your eyes again
Up through the loftiest region of his Mind:
And in each spacious, and serene domain
The same calm Presence ye shall mark enshrined:
The Thought of God—For pleasure, or for pain
It fills the one great soul of all our kind:
And Conscience to her breast this Truth doth strain.

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Away with blind, empiric argument
To 'stablish that which is the ultimate,
The ground, o'er which all other notions pass!
Man may distort God's Image, not create—
We dim too closely o'er the semblance bent,
With our own breath pure Reason's mystic glass.

XVII. INTERIOR EVIDENCES.

It was not with your gold, nor with your merit
You bought that peace celestial now your own.
You did not those heart-quickening hopes inherit
Like youthful princes born to grace a throne.
These are the fruits of that eternal Spirit,
Who showers His grace on Faith, and Faith alone:
Whose yoke but steadies those that gently bear it,
Whose Presence can but through His Gifts be shown.
These are the proofs, th' assurance which you thought
That you were seeking; while, intent to shun
Truth's living Lord, yourself alone you sought:
Now you have found yourself in Him, and won
The bloodless triumphs of the fields He fought:
The rest your own right hand must teach—Ride on!

XVIII. CONVERSION.

Loud as that trumpet doomed to raise the dead
God's voice doth sometimes fall on us in fear,

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More often with a music low yet clear
Low whispering, ‘It is I: be not afraid.’
And sometimes, mingling strangely joy with dread,
It thrills the spirit's caverned sepulchre
Deep as that voice which on the awe-struck ear
Of him, the three-days-buried, murmuring, said
‘Come forth’—and he arose. O Christians, hail
As brethren all on whom our glorious Sun
At morn, or noon, or latest eve, hath shone
With light, and life: and neither mourn nor rail
Because one light, itself unchanging, showers
A thousand colours on a thousand flowers.

XIX. THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.

How many precious influences meet
In this frail flower, the orphan of the year!
To her the Sun, her little span to cheer,
Sends down two momentary heralds, heat
And light, and pours his tribute at her feet:
Yea, every atom of earth's solid sphere
Shoots forth attractions that concentrate here
And in this lowly creature's pulses beat.
Then wherefore fear that any human soul
Small though it be, is worthless in His sight
Whose Mercy, like His Power, is infinite?
Why doubt that God's eternal Love can reach
At once the vital soul of all and each;
And one vast Sympathy inspire the whole?

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XX. NATURE AND GRACE.

That Light which is the Life alone can give
The living Power which makes us love the Light:
Love it in Faith, and with the Godlike might
Of Love, to Love's one object cling and cleave:
But we can only have what we receive.
By conscience taught man's eye discerns the Right;
But this we lack—the strength to scale its height
That we with it might dwell, and in it live.
Science and Song, their constellated wings
Waving from Eastern unto Western skies,
Soar but to sink. Not any bird that flies
Mounts straight ascending—Grace, and Grace alone
Shoots heavenward, as from yonder altar-stone
The sacrificial flame triumphant springs!

University of Virginia Library

Sonnets.

I. GOD'S GIFTS.